Emma Baldridge: Emma Baldridge’s passion for ceramics leads her to pursue sculpture making in college and future career options

Coiling clay to weave through and attach to her most complicated ceramic creation, senior Emma Baldridge worked on a mask with tangles of vines growing out of the mouth, spending every day after school for three weeks on it. 

Though her processes are long, excruciating and tedious, the end products are worth it for Baldridge. 

Baldridge’s sculptures — mainly consisting of various abstract masks — focus on conveying emotions rather than surface level ideas. Her goal is to relate an emotion through her artwork that will connect to any situation the viewer may be experiencing, leaving her work up to interpretation. 

While she does dread the typical throwing-on-the-wheel-and-glazing-it style of ceramics, Baldridge believes this passion for fine ceramics is an opportunity to grow in uniqueness. 

“I’m not sure anyone else [is] doing [this kind of artwork],” Baldridge said. “So if I can make things that are some of my best work and I can find a place to sell them where no one else is really offering that, then I think I stand a pretty good chance of being able to make some good money off of it.”

East Ceramics and Jewelry teacher Jennifer Hensley believes that Baldridge isn’t held back by worrying what other people think of her artwork. One of Baldridge’s goals this semester was to have a finished product that would get Hensley to say that her art would give her nightmares.

“[Teaching Baldridge has] been kind of fun because she likes to get that grossed out reaction,” Hensley said. “Personally, I find some of them disturbing. That’s also what makes them so successful — they do invoke a reaction from the viewer.”

When COVID-19 came around, Baldridge began throwing herself into her mask-making passion as a way to cope with her anxiety and depression. Baldridge believes that the masks became the sole reason she kept going and graduated high school. 

“Honestly, I was never really into art before I got into ceramics,” Baldridge said. “And [then I had] that first ceramics class, and I just connected with it. It’s just so much better to work in three dimensions than having to figure out how to try to portray three dimensional space on the paper.”

Because colleges have less constraints and restrictions on material use than K-12 schools, Baldridge hopes to get the chance to experiment with new mediums next year, like melted styrofoam or ballistic gel, allowing her to steadily evolve her work. She also plans on holding art shows starting as early as this summer now that her body of work has grown significantly. 

“I was continually surprised [having Baldridge as a student], I never thought I would have someone wanting to make casts of their toes and turn them into metal jewelry,” Hensley said. “That’s Emma!”